The “old boys club” perception of the brokerage industry has not dissipated as quickly as some might have expected a decade ago.

When it comes to the percentage of female advisors at investment dealers surveyed by Investment Executive, the numbers have slowly crawled upward since 1998, with only a 6.1% overall increase to 21% from 14.9%. Maternity leave, family obligations and misconceptions of the brokerage industry are factors that could be steering females down other financial services career paths.

“Firms are just not attracting the percentage of females they should be,” says Hamish Angus, president and CEO of Toronto-based ScotiaMcLeod Inc. “We need to communicate more about what the job entails. Women may have the perception that stockbrokerages are male-oriented environments — and that’s not the case.”

ScotiaMcLeod has a 25% female presence on its board of directors. The firm’s roster of advisors is 18% female and 25% of them have achieved top-producer status. Angus says that looking at the success of these women and explaining their stories and the statistics allows other women to see the channel’s potential: “Those numbers are what is really encouraging, and we need to do a better job at sharing those successes.”

The Toronto-based CSI Corp. is still seeing fewer women than men signing up for the Canadian securities course. Only 45% of those enrolling in the CSC are female, compared to the 60% rate of those who sign up to the CSI’s the Canadian funds course.

The number of women signing up for the CSC has plateaued over the past three years and Roberta Wilton, the CSI’s president and CEO, says it’s not that women are resisting, but that they tend to take different routes to get there. “They may not be jumping right into the brokerage role, but they are definitely still finding a way into the industry.”

Wilton, who has a PhD in arts, is seen as a role model and living proof that you do not need a commerce background to get into the financial services industry. She visits post-secondary institutions and feels that discussing the industry even earlier in the educational process will help recruit females.

“There are many misconceptions that female students have about the financial services industry,” Wilton says. “Females don’t usually dominate the math departments and they begin to self select before the process even begins.”

Winnipeg-based Richardson Partners Financial Ltd. had the second-highest percentage of female advisors among the brokerage firms IE surveyed, with 31%. (Blackmont Capital Inc. topped the survey with 35% of advisors being female.) RPFL president and CEO Sue Dabarno in Toronto says that the brokerage industry can be a rewarding one for women: “This is an industry that does not present hurdles for women to jump over, but presents opportunities for them to get ahead.”

Dabarno believes that times have changed and that technology is part of the reason. Working from home, flexible hours and advisor teams make maternity leave and family obligations more manageable. Still, many women feel a 12-month maternity leave is out.

“The greatest fear a woman advisor has, if she decides to have a family, is who is going to look after her clients when she is gone?” says Kathy Faber, an advisor with Toronto-based TD Waterhouse Private Investment Advice in Brantford, Ont. “Are they going to steal clients while she’s gone or are they not going to take very good care of them so when she comes back, her book of business has been reduced?”

Faber has been in the industry for 14 years and when she had her children she was working at Toronto-based RBC Dominion Securities Inc. She found preparing for maternity leave a difficult ordeal and even had arguments with her boss. Eventually, she decided to write her own policy to ensure that her clients were looked after properly and that other advisors would not steal them from her.

She was gone a total of 10 weeks and even wrote her final level chartered financial analyst exam while in the hospital: “You are so afraid that the longer you stay away the higher the risk that your clients won’t be there when you return.”

TD Waterhouse PIA has set a target of 25% for new female hires in its investment advisor rookie program; it is also one of the first firms in Canada to develop a formal maternity/parental leave policy for full-service brokers. The agreement could help stop “client poaching” and ensure that all clients are taken care of during a leave.

@page_break@“If you are running a business with straight commission, you are stressed to begin with. If you are doing this while you are pregnant, you are even more stressed,” Faber says. “Just to know that it is taken care of while you are on maternity leave is such a relief.”

Lynn Curtin Lange, branch manager and financial advisor at North Shore Wealth Management, an affiliate of Raymond James Ltd. , in Burlington, Ont., has been in the industry for more than 20 years. She has seen first-hand the slow progress that firms are having with females coming on board. “When I first started working as a branch manager, I was the only female in that role in all of Nesbitt Burns,” she says.

Curtin Lange began her career as a research analyst for McLeod Young Weir Ltd. (the predecessor to ScotiaMcLeod) and found there was an equal mix of men and women in the research department. When she decided to take the CSC in 1987, she was one of only two women in her class and realized that it was a completely different environment. “We were both accountants and I think that had a lot to do with our survival rate,” Curtin Lange says.

After moving on to assistant branch manager at Nesbitt Thomson Inc. (the predecessor firm to Toronto-based BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc.), Curtin Lange found that there were limited opportunities to move into a branch manager role without having to move out of her community.

Curtin Lange was then recruited by Merrill Lynch Canada Inc. , which, she says, was way ahead of the times. “The firm had a very strong, positive view of women in the workplace and ended up hiring me as a producing branch manager. I went from being the only female advisor in the office to being the fourth in the office.”

Finding the perfect balance between long work hours and raising a family is daunting. Debra Hewson, president and CEO of Vancouver-based Odlum Brown Ltd. , says that the biggest battle for women is accepting that you can’t have it all. “Some days, you have to be mom first; and other days, you have to be president and CEO first. For the most part, you have to be president and CEO first.”

With three kids and a firm to run, Hewson says she is lucky to work for a compay that supports families. “If I need to take my kid to the doctor and come in a little later, that flexibility makes all the difference. We make choices and we choose to work so we do have to sacrifice some things to succeed.”

With advisors being able to stay up to date and access clients from home, workloads are becoming easier to handle. Firms are offering women’s symposiums, networking events and guest speakers targeted to female interests.

Women are even finding that their gender can work for them. “I have clients who come specifically to me because they want to deal with a female,” Curtin Lange says.

Both genders have also started to broaden their teams or partnerships to include the other sex. For women who have struggled to build their own businesses or continue it while away on maternity leave, the team environment could be a new-found solution. IE